The Final Day of Development – Day 6, Monday

So often when talking about agile development, especially in the Federal space, metrics such as velocity are considered important to determine how well a team is doing. However, I think the most important metric for an agile project is the time it takes to change code and deliver it to production. Companies like Netflix are known for doing hundreds of releases to production per day. Using Jenkins and Maven to build, continuously integrate, and automatically test our code allowed our team to rapidly make changes, get feedback, and respond to that feedback. Additionally, we used the Wildfly plugin to enable continuous deployment, which allowed our product owner to immediately see our team’s code changes to track our progress and to help adjust our direction if needed. This rapid feedback loop was the key to our success in being able to deliver for this project, and it is also been the underlying factor of many successful projects I’ve been on over the years.

Leveraging our abilities to setup a Platform as a Service (PaaS) using Amazon Web Services (AWS) was also another key in getting up-and-running quickly. We have been moving many of Dev Technology’s internal projects into the cloud over the last year or so and we continue to be more and more impressed with Amazon’s support and the quality of their tools.

Pending any major bugs, Day 6 will be the last day of development. We spent our remaining time cleaning up the UI a bit more based on yesterday’s review session and adding pagination to the search results. With a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline “pressing the golden image” is a little anti-climatic (in a good way). Once the entire team felt like the software met our quality controls and usability standards we tagged the code in GitHub and uploaded the war file to the repository for ease of auto-install into Docker for those who wish to run this project locally. Lastly, Larry removed our write access to the DRIC repository to prevent any eager developers from making changes.

We have some other user stories in the backlog, but unfortunately it is time to get back to other projects. We will keep our user stories in JIRA and maybe get back to adding more features to DRIC in the future. It’s been a really fun project to work on. The team has been great and we’re excited to submit our work to 18F and to hopefully be a part of this exciting contract vehicle.